This story by a distinguished Polish novelist, who died in 1991, is almost unrelievedly dark and brutal - unrelieved, that is, except by occasional episodes of black comedy and primitive, almost animal sex. It is told in the first person, by a gipsy boy (he may also be Jewish) who is abandoned by his parents in the second World War in an unspecified East European region which could be Poland, or Slovenia, or indeed any of half a dozen places. The peasants he meets are usually ignorant, superstitious, brutal, and with a sullen resentment of any outsider - which of course includes him, in more than one sense. He survives somehow, and there is even a taint dawn glow of light and hope in the final pages, but this is not a novel for the squeamish or the idealistic. (Incidentally, did Kosinski perhaps take a leaf or two from Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus?)